"Google and MPEG LA announced today that they have entered into agreements granting Google a license to techniques that may be essential to VP8 and earlier-generation VPx video compression technologies under patents owned by 11 patent holders. The agreements also grant Google the right to sublicense those techniques to any user of VP8, whether the VP8 implementation is by Google or another entity. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one next-generation VPx video codec. As a result of the agreements, MPEG LA will discontinue its effort to form a VP8 patent pool." The word that stood out to me: the auxiliary verb 'may', which has a rather low epistemic modality. To me, this indicates that this is not so much a clear-cut case of VP8 infringing upon patents, but more a precautionary move on Google's part.

which (FUD) has been completely nonexistent since shortly after Google's announcements

FUD was triggered by MPEG-LA saying "they are going after" blah, blah, blah. Apple and MS slyly said they aren't going to implement VPx since "it's risky". That's exactly how FUD was working until now. So Google tries to fix that. I see no evidence so far that there are some actual patents which affect VPx. WebM blog writes they'll publish more info later, so let's wait. But I suspect we might never get info about what patents Google licensed if any.

We anticipate having the terms of our sublicense ready in the next few weeks. When those terms are ready we will blog about them here, so watch this space.